


Hope for the morning

by ThirdGenerationRockette



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-02-09
Packaged: 2019-03-15 23:51:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13624098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThirdGenerationRockette/pseuds/ThirdGenerationRockette
Summary: He's calling her at 12:44am, which can surely mean only one thing; it's Wednesday, barely, and he's not even waiting until Friday to fire her, he's doing it right now. Sighing as she prepares for her inevitable fate, she answers the call.





	Hope for the morning

It's been a long, strange, anxiety-inducing few days, yet she feels exhilarated, reinvigorated, and more motivated than she has since the day she was sent home by CNN five months ago. She's fairly certain he hates her, even after all this time, and somewhere deep in the pit of her stomach she feels sure he always will, but then the tiny spark of optimism that never seems to completely desert her tickles the back of her neck and reminds her that maybe there's hope.

Rolling over, she sighs and looks at the clock, frowning as it taunts her with its huge red figures. 12:42am, she should be asleep, she should be exhausted, yet she's wide awake and over-analysing everything she's said and done since she walked through the ACN doors. Will's face when he saw her, the familiar flipping of her stomach when she saw him, the look on Jim's face as he started to realise there was a history he'd somehow missed until now.

If the first morning felt like they were skating on thin ice, then as the day went on they crashed through it and spent the afternoon trying desperately to make it to the surface. Today, day two, felt like they accepted that just below the ice and scrambling for air is where they would exist for now, maybe even for as long as she stays, as she tries to make it through one Friday after another, doing a good job, trying to forget Will hates her. Not for the first time she wonders if she's made a terrible mistake, if she took the job for all the wrong reasons, but then she pictures Charlie's face when he found her drinking on a Monday morning, remembers her relief at knowing someone thought she was still worth hiring, and realises that whatever her mixed bag of reasons, the right one is probably in there somewhere.

She's about to abandon any hope of sleep and get out of bed to make tea and find something trashy on TV when the phone rings, startling her and sending her heart leaping into her mouth. Cursing her shitty eyesight when she grabs it and can't immediately see the name on the screen, she pulls her glasses slightly haphazardly onto her face, relief flooding through her when she sees it's neither of her parents calling, rapidly followed by panic at the sight of Will's name. He's calling her at 12:44am, which can surely mean only one thing; it's Wednesday, barely, and he's not even waiting until Friday to fire her, he's doing it right now. Sighing as she prepares for her inevitable fate, she answers the call.

“Do you know what time it is?” she asks, silently ordering her voice not to betray her with even the tiniest tremor.

“Midnight? Or thereabouts,” he answers, the tone of his voice making it clear he hasn't been sleeping either. “I was just thinking about tonight's show, and what we should be leading on, and then I started thinking about the team and how they're-”

“Wait, you were...” She's confused, her conviction just seconds earlier that she was about to be fired fading as she realises he's calling to talk about the show, or about work in some respect. “It's almost one in the morning and you're calling to talk about...work?”

“Yeah.” He sounds impatient, like he can't quite understand why she's questioning him. “I'd hardly be calling at this time to ask if you think I should go for a blue tie or a green tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she says, sitting up and leaning back against her headboard, swallowing hard to quell the sudden lump in her throat, one of pure relief, she thinks.

“Okay?” Now he sounds confused, no doubt wondering why she's fallen silent.

“Yeah, go ahead, say whatever you need to say that's so important you just had to say it in the middle of the night.” She bites her lip, wondering just for a second if he can hear the smile in her voice. “Oh, and blue.”

“What?” His confusion deepens, and she grins as she pictures him frowning and running his hand through his hair.

“The tie,” she says, shifting slightly, pushing herself back into the pillows, making herself more comfortable as she senses this conversation could run for a while. “Blue. Always blue.”

“Right, yeah.” He sighs and she recognises it as a McAvoy page break more than anything, so she waits for him to reset himself and carry on where he left off. “The staff. I'm sure they're all perfectly...capable, but they're...I mean, they're-”

“They're what?” She has an inkling she knows where this is going, but he's the one who called post-midnight to raise it so she sure as hell isn't going to make it easy for him. “And yes, they're all very capable, as it happens.”

“I'm sure when they grow up they will be, but they're...” The sigh, again. “Seriously, Mac, they're all, like, fifteen years old.”

“Listen, I know you're so old now that everyone seems fifteen to you, but I can absolutely assure you there isn't a single member of our staff younger than twenty-three,” she says, fairly sure that's true, or close to true...regardless, she's absolutely certain that nobody is fifteen, so even if she's slightly off with the numbers she knows she's still right. “It's not like I took a detour on my way in yesterday and hijacked a school bus. I think there's a lot to be said for young, enthusiastic journalists eager to learn, but even I have my limits.”

“First off, it's not because I'm old,” he says, so huffily that she has to repress a snort which ends up sounding worse than it would have had she just let it out to begin with. “I just...twenty-three, seriously?”

“Do I need to remind you that when you were twenty-three you were a prosecutor with a conviction record that was off the scale? I doubt I do, so why would you automatically make the assumption the team I brought with me are just a bunch of dumb kids?” She lets out a sigh, loudly and somewhat for effect, but what the hell, it's almost one in the morning and he seems to have called to surreptitiously whine about feeling old. “It's been two days, Will, and two days of total chaos at that. You need to let them at least try to prove themselves before you write them off.”

“I'm not writing them off, I'm just...” He huffs and she thinks he's going to continue but he doesn't so she cuts in.

“You're just feeling old surrounded by a gaggle of twenty-somethings?” She smiles at the idea that he's so sensitive about his age when it really doesn't matter at all. “Age is all bullshit anyway, it's just a number, you know that. My dad always says you're only as old as you feel...or actually, what he says is a slightly more risqué version of that, but still, he's right, you _are_ only as old as you feel.”

“I'm guessing that was meant to help but given I feel about a hundred and fucking five most of the time, it really didn't,” he says, falling silent again, making her wonder for the first time just how bad things have been for him in the three years since she saw him.

“Well, you don't look it.” She figures she'll do what she always does, try to be the cheerful one, the positive one, even though she knows she's to blame for his misery. “You look every bit as handsome as you did when we first met.”

As soon as the words fall from her lips she wishes she could take them back. Not because she doesn't mean them (because she does, she _really_ does, she could barely take her eyes off him yesterday even when it seemed that he couldn't even stand to look at her), but because she already feels like she's walking on eggshells without opening her damn mouth and making things more awkward.

“I think it's blatantly clear which one of us is ageing better, Mackenzie.” His voice is low, soft, and it rumbles in her ear, sending a familiar warmth spreading through her, a flush into her cheeks she's glad he can't see.

“I'm twelve years younger than you, it would be really fucking unfair if I looked older, wouldn't it?” She recovers and smiles, pushing her bedding away in the face of her sudden flush, daring to let herself enjoy the easy repartee between them even if deep down she has a feeling it won't last, that he won't let it.

“Yeah, I guess.” He pauses and she stays silent, scared to ruin the moment, suddenly aware that she needed this, she needed some thread of hope to grasp, no matter how tenuous. “So, if I go digging into each and every staff member I won't find a single one of them under twenty-three, that's what you're telling me?”

“Well...” She's fairly sure she picked a good enough number out of thin air when she picked twenty-three, but of course he'd call her on it, of course he would. “You definitely won't find that any of them are fifteen.”

“Good enough,” he says and she knows he's grinning, she can hear it as clear as she would see it if he was standing in front of her. “I guess...we can probably just talk about this in the morning.”

“You think?” She hears a light snort down the phone and it makes her smile.

She remembers so clearly how he used to do this on the rare nights they weren't together, how he'd call with a question or with something he wanted to tell her, purely because he wanted to hear her voice. She wishes she knew the reason for his call tonight. So many silent, dark nights when she was embedded she yearned to hear his voice, the soothing late night softness in his tone that always calmed her, no matter what.

“Alright, I have some staff research to do, it seems, so I guess I'll see you in the morning.” His voice cuts into her thoughts, startling her slightly.

“Yeah, and you owe me a coffee,” she says, reluctant to end the call, knowing that the Will of right now is not the Will who spent the last two days oozing contempt for her very presence in his newsroom.

“Nice try, but I know how your voice sounds when you've just woken up, and I know I didn't wake you tonight,” he says, again reminding her of how well he knows her and filling her with a fresh sense of sadness at how she fucked it all up.

“That's true, but you could have...” She's aware she's pushing his goodwill to its absolute limit but she can't bring herself to hang up, not quite yet. “Besides, you earn about five trillion dollars a week, you can shout me a coffee.”

“Get some sleep, Mackenzie.” The smile in his voice is obvious again and she wishes she could see him. She's missed his smile, his slightly lop-sided, slightly self-conscious, but madly endearing and stupidly attractive smile. “See you in the morning.”

He's gone before she has chance to reply, the silence on the line feeling impossibly loud until she eventually rolls over and puts her phone down on the table beside her bed. She knows the spell is broken for now and Will's mood tonight won't be his mood in the morning, but it's given her something for the morning, something she fought to hang onto when she was overseas but thought was lost on her return; hope.


End file.
